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SyFy manages a neat trick with ‘The Magicians’..

SyFy manages a neat trick with ‘The Magicians’..

(Photo: Syfy / Hilary Bronwyn Gayle / SyFy )

There’s a kind of sly genius behind the SyFy Channel’s new series “The Magicians,” which begins with a number of thinly disguised references to frothy, magic-laced fantasies such as “Harry Potter,” “The Secret Garden” and “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” among others.

But “The Magicians,” premiering Monday, Jan. 25, is anything but adapted kiddie lit.

  • The series, adapted by Sera Gamble and John McNamara from Lev Grossman’s best-selling trilogy, focuses on misfit and recent college graduate Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), who is about to take an entrance exam for postgraduate work at Yale.

As a kid, he was deeply into fantasy and magic, as were many of his friends, including his bestie, Julia (Stella Maeve). Other kids grew out of the fantasy phase, but not Quentin. He knows what he’s supposed to be doing at this point in his life, but his heart isn’t in it. His Peter Pan syndrome has landed him in a mental institution for a few days and earned him a mood-leveling drug prescription.

Quentin is fixated on a five-novel series of fantasy books by the fictional Christopher Plover called “Fillory & Further,” about three English children who enter a secret world by stepping into a grandfather clock. One day, Quentin is handed the manuscript of a hitherto unknown sixth book in the series, which leads him into the land of Fillory and to an upstate New York magic college known as Brakebills University.  Read more…

http://www.sfchronicle.com/tv/article/SyFy-manages-a-neat-trick-with-The-Magicians-6772018.php

TV Magician Dynamo And Interior Designer Kelly Hoppen Collaborate on Mind-Bending 3D Wallpaper..

TV Magician Dynamo And Interior Designer Kelly Hoppen Collaborate on Mind-Bending 3D Wallpaper..

Magician Dynamo has teamed up with interior designer Kelly Hoppen to create a range of wallpaper that uses optical illusions to make rooms appear bigger.

The digitally printed wallpapers feature the ‘trompe l’oeil’ art technique, which uses realistic images to create optical illusions, often in 3D.

The patterns have been developed to give a sense of more space within the home.

The Enigma design features a series of blocks that appear to be extending out of the wall and into the room, while the Paradox pattern depicts an angled concrete wall that appears to include recesses. Read more..

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/tv-magician-dynamo-interior-designer-164513809.html

‘Sleight’ Is A Must-See Thriller About A Street Magician [Sundance Review]

‘Sleight’ Is A Must-See Thriller About A Street Magician [Sundance Review]

“Anyone can learn a trick, but doing something nobody else can do makes you a magician.”

The story follows a young street magician named Bo (The Maze Runner’s Jacob Latimore) who is taking care of his little sister Tina (12 Years a Slave’s Storm Reid) following the death of their mother. Performing magic on the streets for tourists isn’t enough to pay the bills, so Bo has turned to peddling drugs at clubs and parties for a local drug dealer Angelo (Psych and West Wing’s Dulé Hill). Making clever use of his sleight of hand skills, Bo is able to avoid trouble from the police.

When another dealer tries to take over the Los Angeles market, Bo is propelled into a world of guns and gang violence, definitely not the “selling dime bags to club-goers” job he signed up for. Along the way, Bo falls for a girl named Holly (Seychelles Gabriel, a stand-out from the television series Falling Skies).  And of course, quitting the drug business isn’t as easy as it sounds — the film transitions from a moretypical indie drama into a comic book origin story disguised inside a thriller. How will Bo use his magic skills to get out of this situation?

Dillard is a refreshing new filmmaker who is certainly one to watch. This may be his first feature film, but Dillard has directed some music videos and is also developing a film project for Bad Robot and Paramount Pictures (the details on this project are unknown). When I saw Safety Not Guaranteed at Sundance a few years back, I knew that Colin Trevorrow was about to be tapped for much bigger films (but even I wouldn’t have predicted Star Wars and Jurassic Park sequels). I think its easy to see Dillard will probably also capture the attention of Hollywood genre films — I could definitely see him at the helm of a future Marvel movie.  Read more……  http://www.slashfilm.com/sleight-movie-review/

Secret Skulls Found in a Victorian Painting of a 16th-Century Magician..

Secret Skulls Found in a Victorian Painting of a 16th-Century Magician..

Detail of skulls revealed in an X-ray of Henry Gillard Glindoni’s “John Dee performing an experiment before Queen Elizabeth I” (late 19th century) (courtesy Royal College of Physicians)

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A ring of human skulls originally circled 16th-century magician John Dee in a painting by the English artist Henry Gillard Glindoni. New X-ray imaging has revealed the macabre secret, which a patron likely asked Glindoni to hide in his late-19th-century re-creation of Dee’s performance for Queen Elizabeth I.

The discovery was made in research for Scholar, Courtier, Magician: The Lost Library of John Dee, opened this week at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London. In our previous coverage of the exhibition, curator Katie Birkwood explained that in Tudor England, “the distinctions between magic and natural philosophy — as the subject we now think of science would have been termed then — were not nearly so clear-cut” as they are today. The alteration of the painting, from a vivid black magic ritual to a scene more suggestive of a scientific demonstration, likewise represents the tension in Dee’s identity between being a man of science and one of the occult. As in Joseph Wright of Derby’s“The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus” (1771), where the bright light of the chemical reaction of phosphorus is framed as a supernatural act, the division between the two is blurred in Glindoni’s painting.

http://hyperallergic.com/269477/secret-skulls-found-in-a-victorian-painting-of-a-16th-century-magician/